The Broadcast Engineering Conservation Group
Richard Harris & Jeffrey Borinsky
What do you do at a television outside broadcast (OB) when you’re miles from the nearest mains supply? Or you have mains but nowhere near enough current for the heavy demands of an OB? The answer is a mobile generator.
Continue reading “P5 – The power of television”By Ruth Slavid, Jeffrey Borinsky and Helen Casey.
Following on from Helen’s article A Rural Surprise, the National Transport Trust magazine Transport Digest have published a follow-up article about our Vivat re-creation.
Continue reading “Vivat!”We are delighted to announce that we have bought a former BBC mobile generator vehicle at auction. It came up at the CVA Doncaster commercial vehicle and plant online auction on 20 October 2020. The auctioneer contacted us because of Ruth Slavid’s article in Commercial Motor. We are grateful for assistance from Mark Forrester and his company, Euromunicipal, who are regular customers of CVA and bid on our behalf. At very short notice we managed to secure enough funding, but with a struggle and only just.
By Helen Casey.
Helen Casey, the widow of BECG friend Terry Casey, originally wrote this article for the National Transport Trust magazine Transport Digest.
Continue reading “A Rural Surprise”Long live Vivat! – Jeffrey Borinsky and Paul Marshall
When we wrote about some of our outside broadcast (OB) trucks in the Winter 2019 Bulletin, we said a little about Vivat, our oldest truck, but this fascinating project deserves a closer look. It is a re-creation, as near as is technically possible, of an OB truck that was used at the Queen’s coronation on 2 June 1953.
Continue reading “Long Live Vivat!”By Dan Cranefield, Senior Engineering Manager, BBC Tel OBs.
Dan Cranefield looks into the beginnings of location drama shot on videotape instead of film.
Continue reading “Early Location Drama in Colour”Richard’s Roving Eye article continues to evolve, with more history appearing!
Updates include:
By Dan Cranefield, Senior Engineering Manager, BBC Tel OBs
After the war BBC Television Outside Broadcasts (Tel OBs) operated from their base at the Palace of Arts in Wembley, one of the substantial buildings which were built there specially for the British Empire Exhibition in 1924. Some of these buildings were put to other uses later on.
Continue reading “My “Palace of Arts” Days”Richard’s article about The BBC Roving Eye vehicles has been updated again, as more information is being brought to our attention!
The latest update includes some colour pictures of REII at Churchill’s funeral and some new pictures of NYN 286Y.
There were only ever ten of these as eventually the BBC simply hired generators from outside organisations.
Richard’s article relates everything that he could discover about each of the ten.
You can read this article here: BBC Power Generators.
